At the end of they day, Abdul will return to his tin shack, and at the end of some longer time period our President's press secretary will eventually return from vacation. One hopes we never need to think about Afghanistan again, but 26 years after the US evacuated Saigon it should have been clear that the invasion would end badly, what with Pashtun tribesmen surely caring less about Liberal Democracy than the South Vietnamese. I guess American tolerance for the sexual enslavement of children wasn't enough of a lure; unrelatedly, I wonder what those parachuteless skydivers thought they would face if they remained in Kabul.
Everybody but the professional idiots on cable can puzzle out why it couldn't have worked, hence Jake Tapper's job: distract from the obvious descent into senility of the regime, to say nothing of our CinC. They have lost the Mandate of Heaven, it's a Crisis of [America's] Third Century, et cetera, et cetera. It might be safe for Don Lemon to lightly criticize the foreign policy establishment if he then insists we put a woman in charge.
On a different note: Machiavelli's wisdom holds up now, but it has a shelf life, and it will expire long before modern militaries deploy Matrix-style Sentinel drones. The technology for mass surveillance at a scale and depth as to entirely prevent insurgencies like the Taliban's will soon exist, if it doesn't already.
It's true that nations are fictions, mental constructs, lines that exist on a map but not in the physical world. But, is is also a fiction that "we" care much about the 12-year old girl we've never met, who is denied an education and resigned to a life of sexual slavery. Those who profess to care are peacocks. Where are they now? They are the same people who will say 'it's not as bad as depicted,' or 'it was the military's fault,' or 'it was this administration or that administration's fault.'
The sad truth is "we" care a little. We care until it is too much trouble, too costly, or until the media shines something shiny in our faces. Then, come what may. We got mileage from claiming we cared. It's the national virtue-signaling that counts, not actual betterment. We'll now move on to the next issue that social media tells us we should care about. And we'll virtue signal on social media to prove our worth. A couple likes should get the job done.
It's nice to see somebody gets it. The lesson the U.S. failed to learn was that of WWII. If you're going to build a new nation, first you have to destroy the old nation and leave the survivors fearing you more than any of their Gods. But there's no way that would sell with the American public today. We want clean wars with our smart bombs and our predator drones and our stealth fighter planes. All that fancy tech will allow you to win battles with a low body count on both sides, too; but it won't win any wars. It will only ensure the battles drag on and on until finally, you lose.
Well said. Our only option after shoving the Taliban aside some 20 years ago was to award the tribes we liked some largess, allowed them to do as they wished with other tribes and leave. They in no way were like the Japanese or Germans or Koreans in their war aftermath, they were a loose collection of tribes whose best central government merely decided inter-tribal disputes. Afghanistan was never more than lines on a map, a suburb of Pakistan so to speak with tribal Lords maintaining an ancient system of justice in controlled areas. As you note, pretending it was a nation was fruitless. Their central government has been busy storing our money in their Swiss accounts and if they were wise started leaving months ago. Ain't hindsight great! Richard Engel called it years earlier from Egypt, many of the most religious will die to stay in the 14th century.
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, rampant corruption threatens security and the rule of law.
[--->] September 25, 2011 | By Sarah Chayes
... a worldwide explosion of outrage at what historians may someday come to deem humanity's latest form of tyranny: the capture of states by criminal syndicates. Otherwise known as rampant public corruption.
In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.
I have watched the phenomenon evolve over the last 10 years. At first, there was a furtive testing of the limits, as Kalashnikov-toting ruffians shook down travelers for "sweets" (as extorted bribes are prudishly called). Over time, the corruption expanded and evolved, and today, Afghanistan is controlled by a structured, mafiaesque system, in which money flows upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of probity most needed to build a sustainable state.
... my musings led me further afield, to consider political philosophy. Was mafia government, I began to wonder, also posing a threat to the entire phase of political history in which we live?
This phase, which could be said to have begun with the Enlightenment, has been marked by an ongoing evolution of reason-based rules for governing society that have been embraced by an ever-wider swath of the world.
The Enlightenment (historians and philosophers, please forgive the simplification) was the moment when certain Western countries dethroned God from his role directly ordering human affairs. A set of rules was substituted, derived from human reason and thus subject to amendment and expansion as conditions evolved or as the understanding of who is a full human being in the eyes of the law — and could therefore benefit from these protections — expanded. One of the key elements of these rule-based systems has been legal recourse against perceived abuse of power.
But if such a rule-based system is captured by a criminal network, thus injecting an intolerable degree of the arbitrary into the award of opportunity or benefit, then citizens are denied fair recourse. To whom, then, should they turn for redress of legitimate grievances? In many cases — in Afghanistan as well as in Nigeria or Uzbekistan — they have turned back to their interpretation of God and his laws, obliterating more than 200 years of political history.
At the end of they day, Abdul will return to his tin shack, and at the end of some longer time period our President's press secretary will eventually return from vacation. One hopes we never need to think about Afghanistan again, but 26 years after the US evacuated Saigon it should have been clear that the invasion would end badly, what with Pashtun tribesmen surely caring less about Liberal Democracy than the South Vietnamese. I guess American tolerance for the sexual enslavement of children wasn't enough of a lure; unrelatedly, I wonder what those parachuteless skydivers thought they would face if they remained in Kabul.
Everybody but the professional idiots on cable can puzzle out why it couldn't have worked, hence Jake Tapper's job: distract from the obvious descent into senility of the regime, to say nothing of our CinC. They have lost the Mandate of Heaven, it's a Crisis of [America's] Third Century, et cetera, et cetera. It might be safe for Don Lemon to lightly criticize the foreign policy establishment if he then insists we put a woman in charge.
On a different note: Machiavelli's wisdom holds up now, but it has a shelf life, and it will expire long before modern militaries deploy Matrix-style Sentinel drones. The technology for mass surveillance at a scale and depth as to entirely prevent insurgencies like the Taliban's will soon exist, if it doesn't already.
It's true that nations are fictions, mental constructs, lines that exist on a map but not in the physical world. But, is is also a fiction that "we" care much about the 12-year old girl we've never met, who is denied an education and resigned to a life of sexual slavery. Those who profess to care are peacocks. Where are they now? They are the same people who will say 'it's not as bad as depicted,' or 'it was the military's fault,' or 'it was this administration or that administration's fault.'
The sad truth is "we" care a little. We care until it is too much trouble, too costly, or until the media shines something shiny in our faces. Then, come what may. We got mileage from claiming we cared. It's the national virtue-signaling that counts, not actual betterment. We'll now move on to the next issue that social media tells us we should care about. And we'll virtue signal on social media to prove our worth. A couple likes should get the job done.
It's nice to see somebody gets it. The lesson the U.S. failed to learn was that of WWII. If you're going to build a new nation, first you have to destroy the old nation and leave the survivors fearing you more than any of their Gods. But there's no way that would sell with the American public today. We want clean wars with our smart bombs and our predator drones and our stealth fighter planes. All that fancy tech will allow you to win battles with a low body count on both sides, too; but it won't win any wars. It will only ensure the battles drag on and on until finally, you lose.
Well said. Our only option after shoving the Taliban aside some 20 years ago was to award the tribes we liked some largess, allowed them to do as they wished with other tribes and leave. They in no way were like the Japanese or Germans or Koreans in their war aftermath, they were a loose collection of tribes whose best central government merely decided inter-tribal disputes. Afghanistan was never more than lines on a map, a suburb of Pakistan so to speak with tribal Lords maintaining an ancient system of justice in controlled areas. As you note, pretending it was a nation was fruitless. Their central government has been busy storing our money in their Swiss accounts and if they were wise started leaving months ago. Ain't hindsight great! Richard Engel called it years earlier from Egypt, many of the most religious will die to stay in the 14th century.
http://web.archive.org/web/20180423034313/http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/25/opinion/la-oe-chayes-corruption-20110
excerpt:
Op-Ed
Government by crime syndicate
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, rampant corruption threatens security and the rule of law.
[--->] September 25, 2011 | By Sarah Chayes
... a worldwide explosion of outrage at what historians may someday come to deem humanity's latest form of tyranny: the capture of states by criminal syndicates. Otherwise known as rampant public corruption.
In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.
I have watched the phenomenon evolve over the last 10 years. At first, there was a furtive testing of the limits, as Kalashnikov-toting ruffians shook down travelers for "sweets" (as extorted bribes are prudishly called). Over time, the corruption expanded and evolved, and today, Afghanistan is controlled by a structured, mafiaesque system, in which money flows upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of probity most needed to build a sustainable state.
... my musings led me further afield, to consider political philosophy. Was mafia government, I began to wonder, also posing a threat to the entire phase of political history in which we live?
This phase, which could be said to have begun with the Enlightenment, has been marked by an ongoing evolution of reason-based rules for governing society that have been embraced by an ever-wider swath of the world.
The Enlightenment (historians and philosophers, please forgive the simplification) was the moment when certain Western countries dethroned God from his role directly ordering human affairs. A set of rules was substituted, derived from human reason and thus subject to amendment and expansion as conditions evolved or as the understanding of who is a full human being in the eyes of the law — and could therefore benefit from these protections — expanded. One of the key elements of these rule-based systems has been legal recourse against perceived abuse of power.
But if such a rule-based system is captured by a criminal network, thus injecting an intolerable degree of the arbitrary into the award of opportunity or benefit, then citizens are denied fair recourse. To whom, then, should they turn for redress of legitimate grievances? In many cases — in Afghanistan as well as in Nigeria or Uzbekistan — they have turned back to their interpretation of God and his laws, obliterating more than 200 years of political history.
...